Sprout Hires Akre for Non-QM Funding Push

In a move that could jumpstart its mortgage-bond issuing efforts, Sprout Mortgage has hired David Akre to head its capital-markets unit.

Akre, a securitization veteran whose former employers include Five Oaks Investment, New York Mortgage Trust and Thornburg Mortgage, arrived last week with the title of executive vice president. Among his initial tasks: fine tuning Sprout’s conduit operation, which has been slow to produce an initial bond offering.

The Irving, Texas, company works with correspondent lenders to write prime-quality and subprime loans, including those that don’t meet the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’s “qualified-mortgage” standards. It also offers financing to property investors.

Sprout had been planning an initial securitization of non-qualified accounts in 2017, and was talking to underwriters and rating agencies about the effort. But it held off, instead selling a $200 million-plus pool of receivables to Neuberger Berman.

Neuberger, in turn, funneled those credits into the collateral pool for its first-ever securitization of non-qualified mortgages — a $465.9 million transaction that priced on July 31 with Citigroup and Credit Suisse running the books (see Initial Pricings on Page 10).

Akre’s arrival follows the May departure of vice chairman and chief investment officer Andrew Platt, who had been at Sprout since 2015. Platt, who previously worked in securitization at UBS, Bank of America and Lehman Brothers, is currently at Sun West Mortgage.

As a managing director at Five Oaks from 2013 to 2016, Akre led the development of a now-shuttered conduit program that produced multiple bond offerings. Before and after that, he ran his own capital-markets advisory firm, Whole Loan Capital.

Akre also led the securitization program at New York Mortgage Trust, where he was co-founder and co-chief executive. That was preceded by his time at Thornburg, along with stops at Principal Asset Markets, GE Capital and Security Pacific Bank.